DeMaio Requests Full Count

Liz Maland, City Clerk
City of San Diego
202 C Street
San Diego, CA 92101-4806

Dear Ms. Maland:

Please accept this letter as a formal request to challenge the determination of the Registrar of Voters regarding the sufficiency of signatures submitted under the Competition & Transparency in City Contracting Initiative.

This ballot initiative was filed because the labor unions and city leaders have not respected the votes cast by the vast majority of San Diegans in 2006 under Proposition C on Managed Competition.

Every San Diegan who signed this petition desires to reform their city government – and every signature should therefore be counted. As such, we hereby request that the process for determining the sufficiency of the petition provide for an immediate a full
count of every signature submitted.

This request is pursuant to process your office advised it would use when we originally filed the petition on December 22, 2010. It is also consistent with the process explicitly outlined in your letter to our campaign dated June 28, 2010 – and consistent to the
process you outlined in the letter dated June 14, 2010 accepting the petition as filed.

Consistent with the cost estimate your office has provided to our campaign for the full count verification method, and pursuant to your request, a certified check in the amount of $151,693.24 will be provided to your office by the deadline Friday, July 2, 2010.

Comments 3

What’s with the:
“This week, the registrar of voters announced that Councilman Carl DeMaio’s major ballot initiative didn’t have enough petition signatures in a sample count to make it onto the November ballot.

But wait. If you extrapolate the number of valid signatures in the sample count to the full number of filed signatures, it looks like the initiative is way ahead of the number needed. So how did it fall short by a big margin?

The answer lies in a complicated mathematical formula that tied the reporter (me) and an actual statistician in knots until we finally figured it out. The story explains it all.

Meanwhile, CityBeat dug up some interesting dirt on the funding of the petition drive. As it reports, financial disclosures show the committee Reforming City Hall with Carl DeMaio” paying $16,000 to a local company called Hale Media Inc., also for signature gathering. Hale Media is owned by DeMaio’s boyfriend, Johnathan Hale.”

What did Hale Media do? Hale said he didn’t do anything paid himself, but a campaign spokeswoman said Hale’s company served as a kind of payroll service because the campaign’s treasurer is in Orange County.